human connection. The Addams Family, Star Trek and dealing with change

 Lets discuss immortality. Someone made a post asking: “The Addams daily lives in a graveyard, but are basically immortal, so what kills an Addams?”, and the answer was “ they leave when they are done”.

First I want to mention Q from Star Trek TNG. There is an episode where Q is trying to explain his existence, standing in an old dusty clearing, he explains that living forever and being able to do anything can be boring. How he even became the scarecrow hanging outside doing nothing for centuries, just to experience it. Leaving aside the rather obvious God metaphor the TNG writer was trying to make, and seriously consider what immortality would be like. 

For the last couple hundred years humanity has changed what being alive is like in very rapid ways. For thousands of years advancements in lifestyle were local, slow and permanent. But that's no longer the human experience. My grandfather told me he was able to remember the first time he even saw a car. As a rancher he had to repair his own equipment often, so by the time I came along he knew motors inside and out. His entire life was surrounded by machines in a close way. During the time I lived there, the power lines finally came that far out of town, so I was able to experience the transition from using kerosene lamps as the primary lighting source, to using electricity as if it was nothing. The house had been wired for electricity so it has outlets and in-ceiling light fixtures. But prior to the power lines coming out, it needed to be powered by a diesel powered generator. Which was another machine he understood the workings of and made repairs to, but even with the farmers discounted fuel prices, it was expensive so we only ran it on the sabbath, the day of rest. It was a small luxury and a way to offer Grannie a bit more while deserved rest. What I’m trying to say is in a small way I was also able to experience some of the rapid progress of even the last century, and its extreme disruptions to everyday life. Growing up this way, it's natural that I would assume that immortality would be a blessing. That my time would be filled with constantly changing things, and always something new and exciting to learn and experience. 

But let's consider the experience of some eleventh century peasant. What would the prospect of immortality be to them? Labouring every day as their family dies around them for thousands of years isn't the same prospect at all. Sure they could probably look for ways to move into the aristocracy or noble class, and then at least there would be less monotonous labour. But monotony would be all they could expect out of the future. {the type of person that would be suited to surviving immortality then, wouldn't be the type of person that would be at all suited to surviving it now}.

Or put another way, Would Ann Rice’s Contemplative Louie or Thrill-Seeking Lestat, be more suited to eternal survival? (Using the character types from the later books, we are definitely in a Lestat era). 

Back To Q. In his existence, of being all powerful and immortal, he seeks novelty, he does everything he can to find something, Anything to fill his time. We get a sense of desperation from him, a need to do absolutely anything to find a new experience. There is an underlying feeling that even as he has a mastery over time, that time itself is his prison, that existence may be his true antagonist. {keeping in mind the current understanding of the heat-death of the universe, Q would then be aware that he will either be forever suspended in absolute nothingness, or he would have to also be spread out amongst it, essentially being the nothingness itself. None of the Star Treks from the Q era ever breach this subject though}. 

So Q is definitely the type of immortal that wouldn't be scared of periods of change, we see his character as one that would find the long expanses of time where change is slow and rare to be more a threat to him. His novelty-philic identity drives him through time. Where someone who would be comfortable being immortal during the long stretches of time of low change, the novelty-phobic, would be the type that would thrive. 

Currently there is a popular notion that our period of high change will continue indefinitely. But that seems unlikely, for if change is the only constant, then surely there must be changes in the rate of change? Or put simply, doesn't it seem likely that we will reach another plateau where life altering advancements become rare again. Our transition from hunter/gatherer, to villager/farmer was some high change, but we had literally thousands of years where the lifestyle of the average person changed little between then and the last couple hundred years. 

I want to take this back drop and return to the Addams family. One thing that sets them apart from most of our other stories of immortals, is they are a family. Not simply in individual. This would definitely help ease the tension between the novelty-philic and novelty-phobic. As they have the stability of their family group to offer support during times trying to any of them. 

We can see they have an old Victorian house, showing that they enjoy the comfort of predictability.

But they are as individuals some of the most open ones ever shown in common media. They judge no one, they are open to anyone, and welcome all who pass by into their house. The novelty they crave is through human interactions. The children are still immature and crave the experiences of pain and loss, while Gomez and Morticia are enthralled with the more nuanced experiences of love and sexual lust. Gomez with his slightly more contemporary look, shows that he enjoys much of the progressive changing world. While Morticia, is content to spend her days in the conservatory, tending to her plants. This leads me to believe that the primary driving force for each of the Addams is to experience all the internal and emotional experiences of the human condition. Their immortality is nothing more than a tool to help them find more experiences. They don't seek distraction like Q, because being alive isn't a chore to them. In fact they are quite immune to being distracted. What they seem to intuitively be able to ignore, are mostly the things we generally focus on. We see style of clothing, the markers of wealth and poverty, flesh markers of beauty and ugliness, even markers of the passing of time and the temporariness of life. And all of these things the Addams seem oblivious to. They see only other people who by interacting with, they may experience something new, or exciting. Something real.

And in this day where everywhere we look we see the faking of authenticity as a means to convince us that their distraction can give us something “real”, the Addams have a clear message to us. That, what we should fill our time with, is others. Their immortality and wealth remove the need that drives much of our daily lives. Who would you be if those concerns were removed. Truly removed so you weren't shaped by the things shaped by them. “Money can't buy happiness” is a quote only truly believed by those with enough money that trying to survive in its absence isn’t something they can even grasp. 

I hope our current time of technological advancement will continue at least until our need for money as a tool to deal with scarcity is gone. And until our lives are long enough to feel long enough to us and those we leave behind. 

But to survive, and to thrive in such a reality, we will need to lose our need for distraction that we hide as novelty, and our need for predictability that we disguise as stability. We will need to become disconnected with the world and the zeitgeist, and become more connected with each other and experiencing the now. 

marx was wrong. we are literally lost to time, and the next dark age.

 Some ideas on the drawing dark.

Over the years of human history, we see periods of time where information is stored in systems of raising complexity, but along with each rise comes a rise in precariousness. We have cave paintings, that took a long time, were low resolution images and held very limited data, and very limited portability. We see increases in the fidelity of images when we get to optery, then the great paintings then to film cameras and now to digital. The increase of information stored in each step is accompanied by a decrease in permanence and a proliferation of content. Now in our digital age we have high resolution images that not only hold more information than the human eye can discern, but also can hide geo-tags and timestamps. But they are stored on media that will not last. Your great grandchild will never see any of your selfies, as the hard drives, memory sticks and cloud storage will all degrade. While kodak images from the 70’s and 80’s will still remain, but those two will degrade long before the pigments in the mona-lisa do. 

We are diditising all our information, but we are simultaneously destroying bulky hard media. And the precariousness is more than you may think at first blush. I currently only intend to post these words online. Never to be printed by ink onto paper. Their only chance at long term survival being that the company that hosts the site continues to think its profitable to continue to host that page for me.  Even as they do, solar flares and the background radiation of the universe can flip the little ones and zeros at random making whatever system is trying to access them lose the pointer to the next letter in the series. Baring that i must rely on the company hosting it not experiencing any economic shocks, byouts by another company who would want to change or discontinue the service, and although Google and Facebook seem like interminable forces right now, there was a time when ask jeeves, yahoo, myspace, aol all felt the same, as did the immense reach of kodak and polaroid years before. Nothing lasts forever, “stange with eons even  microsoft will die”. 

And as our digital information is only selected to continue based on its current profitability, we are definitely living in a time that will be lost. The only question i have is will it be lost as irrelevant in a continuing digital economy, or if the age we live in, if our information becomes a dark age due the the collapse of that digital economy first. Either way, i see a time when a shock ether ecological, or economic, will have all the knowledge we are creating be lost. 

Its happened in history several time in the past. We don’t know the reason behind the collapse of the mesopotamia civilisation and the loss of information it accompanied. We have theories many competing ones but they all seem to suffer from the same lack of evidence to give us any reasonable certainty. 

So now that I’ve set the stage for our coming dark age, and how all our lives will be lost into it. let me give you one reason ive recently thought of that might make it seem a little less dire. 

Marx believed that the economic system would inevitably lead to workers understanding that all economic value is created by the labor of the working class and that the owning class provides nothing but to usurp that value living off the workers like a parasite. Writing in 1867, it may have seemed inevitable. But now that we are living in situations starting to resemble “late stage capitalism” as marx predicted, what we see is that owners are becoming able to continually make the labor of workers less important in their systems. And instead of worker class consciousness, we are seeing that workers are being forced to compete the ever shrinking tasks we are suited for. The pessimist in me is starting to think that the class war will be won by capital long before the workers are aware a war is even coming. We are moving towards a time where the owners with their wealth will be so rich and isolated that we will become the neo-peasant with no loards, only bosses, banks, and contracts to keep us enslaved. 

How will the coming dark age interplay with this, will it wipe out the information of a time where we once wanted to strive for individuals to be free, and sought higher ideals (Even as we have been wholly inadequate at having those ideals materialized for most)? Will it be a technologically advanced, but stagnating society? (stagnating due to the only innovations being implemented are ones that could promote next quarter profits, and stagnating due to us returning to our history where only the aristocrat class would have the time and resources to devote to innovation, while millions and millions of Einsteinin minds live entire lives without access to information or to a voice for their knowledge to be spread with.)

Or will the collapse be one of population contraction, accompanied by technological contractions, as the previous dark ages did. We wont have the alexandria library to worry about burning, as all human thought and advancement unfortunate enough to not be deemed worthy of printing on paper will vanish as if it never existed at all. 

For simplicity, lets use the highly unlikely, common zombie apocalypse trope… February of 2023 (14 months in the future as of time of writing) never arrives, as between now and then, the zombies come and kill off 99% of the world population. And then for whatever reason the zombie virus goes extinct. That would still leave 78 million people on the planet, but we would be far apart, wed be focused on trying to produce for our basic needs again. We wouldn't have the resources nor the time to repair the underwater cable giving us internet and phone connectivity between the continents. Its unlikely we’d be able to maintain a reliable power grid, and the power we would generate wouldn't be devoted to maintaining googles servers. 

Knowing that most people who were experts in anything would be gone, once we were able to produce enough food and shelter to allow for leisure time, what information could we find to help us recreate the mechanical advantages humanity held in the past? If your town still has a library, it's likely that their technical books are from the 1980’s. Any surviving university libraries or book stores may give us more current information, but how much of that requires previous knowledges that were assumed knowledge for entering students, or were to be taught buy the professors (whose notes are lost to the digital realm). All of this is to say that the digital lives we are creating, all cutting edge knowledge won’t be available for rediscovery by someone booting up an old laptop. (the laptops won't boot up as the information on the hard drive will have been degraded). As were about half way through (what I assume will be a 30 month pandemic), its interesting to think about how much of our electronic information couldn't survive only a few years of inattention. 

Anyways to my tiny thin glimmer of a silver lining. The last dark age was kicked off by a collapse of the power systems that were entranced before, and the ending of the dark age was again accompanied by the collapse of the entrenched power systems. So as I don't see the international proletariat rising up to grant liberty to the masses, my only real hope is that the coming dark will remove our current oppressors, and the next renaissance is kicked off by someone finding egalitarian writings. Either way I’ll probably be dead, and everything ive ever said of value will be lost never to be discovered or known (assuming something I’ll contribute will be valuable lol), and even the lives im able to have a positive effect on now, will be from a timeline never to be known.